tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post59146983519050725..comments2016-12-09T17:12:45.472-05:00Comments on In the Middle: A Door Into StoneJeffrey Cohenhttps://plus.google.com/110433684739546897626noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-71866648830550506092013-03-01T10:01:41.105-05:002013-03-01T10:01:41.105-05:00Are you interested in the past life of geology as ...Are you interested in the past life of geology as a prestige science, in what people have done with the idea of stone? A reason to be:<br /><br />&#39;For thousands of years men have looked at the earth with its stratifications, in some places so clearly mapped out; for thousands of years they must have seen in their quarries and mines, as well as we ourselves, the imbedded petrifications of organic creatures: yet they looked and passed on without thinking more about it – they did not wonder. Not even Aristotle had eyes to see; and the conception of a science of the earth, of Geology, was reserved for the eighteenth century… Here, too, the clearly marked lines of different strata seemed almost to challenge attention, and the pulses of former life were still throbbing in the petrified forms imbedded in grammars and dictionaries. Yet not even a Plato had eyes to see, or ears to hear, and the conception of a science of language, of Glottology, was reserved for the nineteenth century&#39;.<br /><i>Max Müller, 1868 Rede Lecture (delivered in the Senate House at Cambridge)</i><br /><br />Stone is heavy but made heavier by the sediment of its social life....JLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05125485502823425497noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21188006318798397162013-02-28T21:43:15.410-05:002013-02-28T21:43:15.410-05:00Jeffrey:
Thank you for sharing this work.
I ha...Jeffrey:<br /> <br />Thank you for sharing this work. <br /><br />I have two thoughts here about the ‘lithic rebuff’ with which you open and the various theorists that you are using to illuminate what the medieval is already doing.<br /><br />1. The lithic may rebuff, in that without instrumentation like a scratch test, or a mass spectrometer, or without knowing the whole history of a region in geological terms (and this includes of course plate tectonics but also the history of whether an area was once underwater, and what kind of organic matter was there to produce what sorts of minerals long after they lived) we might not have a door to the inside of a rock, unless we break it. That is, more often than not, it is through <i>surface</i> that we humans encounter stone--and yet, this surface is so often affectively active. The hardness and texture of a rock’s surface--its record of its own long interactions with weathering, etc., IS in fact a door. And why would the feel of a rock’s surface in running your hand across it, in which we—however lightly and insignificantly—contribute to its erosion, not ‘count’ as being hooked into that lithic being. <br /><br />In this respect, I see why Harman would be so helpful to your project, but wonder if<br />even there you don’t need to dispense with the ‘correlationist’ tendency to worry about the question of access and language. Which linguistic surfaces can hook humans, through our languages, into these stony surfaces? That seems to me to be a &#39;door&#39; that would function precisely in never opening to its inside. No need to smash the rock apart...although, I have to wonder what kind of affective connection geological and chemical analysis of stones might do to further en-strange your Bennett-analysis. Anyway, the question here is, how does surface fit in to this project?<br /><br />2. What is it about <i>narrative</i> and stone that has you invested in narrative here? You ask how to tell geo-phlia&#39;s lively story and how to find the words for stone, and it seems to me that delineating geo-diction and geo-narrative are maybe different tasks--tasks that operate on different scales and can be, but are not necessarily, related. One is a question of poetic or technical diction (or both at once), the other a question of a larger and temporal structure of meaning: one tends to fragment or partiality, notation, gloss, index, recombination, the disorder and general ‘bad-citizen’-ness of the poet kicked out of the republic for the power of language over the human mind and body; the other—‘narrative—tends towards legible structure, beginnings middles and ends, totalities, abstractions, etc (there are major exceptions, these are gross gross generalizations).&#39;Finding the words&#39; sounds like the task of the poet, the translator, the lyricist (even the lexicologist)--whose projects are so often concerted attempts to disrupt narrative as a structure, resist the inevitable &#39;sense of an ending&#39; etc etc. As this pertains to your desire to see how medieval lit. imagines the enchantment of the lithic in a non-theological mode, I think of the lapidary, which may veer into, but functions quite otherwise than as narrative: procedures for using stones, a manual for the marvelous, less so a story. Alternately, the rock in Orfeo, or the rock under which Merlin is cast—are these stones the object of the narrative or rather a growth-principle of the narrative. As ‘stories of stone’ the force or your preposition here is less stories concerning stone, stories with stone as object, than the possessive genitive: stories owned by, driven by, stone. Maybe? <br /><br />I’m not sure why I didn’t have these questions based on the title of the project alone, but someone seeing some concrete writing brought them to the fore for me. And I don&#39;t mean these questions as a snare, but as a further opening of what it is you are doing, how maybe you are doing more than you are fessing up to as of yet. <br />dan remeinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.com